With little success negotiating systemwide digital cable carriage...

Liroff, chief technology officer for the WGBH Education Foundation, said concurrent with efforts on the Hill and at the FCC, APTS and PBS were negotiating with the NCTA and individual MSOs. PBS was “in the process of concluding a [carriage] deal” with Cox, he said. Liroff referred questions about details to PBS. A PBS spokeswoman confirmed that negotiations were on with Cox, but said the 2 weren’t on the “verge of an agreement.” The talks with Cox were going well, she said. Cox declined to comment. The sticking point in negotiations with NCTA was the “stringent” program nonduplication requirements, he said, and an “appropriate balance” needed to be struck. The question was whether NCTA would make exceptions from nonduplication requirements for PTV stations’ educational and children’s programming, Liroff said. Public broadcasters were also trying to get the FCC to change its ruling on “primary video” entitled to carriage, he said. Saying the digital carriage issue was a “continuously moving target,” Liroff said he expected an FCC decision in the spring. As for satellite carriage, he said public broadcasters would raise --during the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act reauthorization hearings in Congress -- issues of digital carriage and the practice by DBS operators of carrying many local PTV stations and small commercial stations on wing satellites. Consumers need a 2nd dish to get programs on wing satellite, he said, and in most cases they don’t bother to get a 2nd dish. Separately, PBS Pres. Pat Mitchell told an annual members meeting Mon. that the enterprise intended to widely disseminate on the Hill and elsewhere results of a recent study it had commissioned that found the public placed more trust in public TV than in Congress or the federal govt. In the study by research firm Roper ASW, PBS bested even courts in public trust, with commercial broadcasters such as ABC, CBS and NBC finishing a distant 3rd. Most respondents said public broadcasting received “too little” federal funding. PBS ranked 2nd only to the military in value for tax dollars: 36% of respondents picked the military as offering “excellent” use of tax payer dollars, 20% PBS. One reason for the study, Mitchell said, was to demonstrate public TV’s uniqueness, and that was why the “measurements” were different from what commercial broadcasters value. In terms of satisfaction with programming, PBS outdid commercial broadcasters and cable, the study found. While 34% of respondents said they were very satisfied with public TV programming, only 24% and 16% gave that rating to cable and commercial broadcasters respectively. But NBC topped the list of most watched networks with 35%, followed by Fox News (35%), ABC (33%), CBS (32%) and PBS and PTV (31%)). Other findings: (1) Most (59%) believe having PBS is “very important,” with 40% and 36% picking commercial broadcasters and cable networks, receptively. (2) PBS came out on top (40%) in trustworthiness of news and public affairs programming, followed by CNN (33%), Fox News (30%), NPR (23%) and NBC (22%). (3) Most (79%) believe govt. funding for PBS is “money well spent.” (4) More than half said they considered federal funding for public broadcasting “too little.” Federal funding makes up about 15% of the public broadcasting budget. PBS said the survey would be repeated annually.